


Strange Allies with Warring Hearts

by blue_wonderer



Series: Olivarry Week 2017 [3]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Day 3:Soulmate AU, First Meetings, M/M, Olivarry Week 2017, Past Laurel Lance/Oliver Queen, Past Sara Lance/Oliver Queen, soulmates can't lie to each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-11
Updated: 2017-07-11
Packaged: 2018-11-30 18:11:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11468946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_wonderer/pseuds/blue_wonderer
Summary: (“It’s you.” Just two words, so big and complicated.)In this world, soulmates are unable to lie to each other. This is a problem, because when Oliver and Barry meet, Oliver is hiding a secret identity and Barry lies about why he's investigating the crime scene.





	Strange Allies with Warring Hearts

Oliver lies to prove that he can. He lies early on in every relationship, a blatant white lie. It clears the air, releases the tension. _I’m not your soulmate, see? I can lie to you. I can lie to you at any time about anything._

“I’m studying to be a rocket scientist,” he tells the boys and girls in college, because everyone knows that the oldest Queen can’t seem to stay enrolled at any given school long enough choose a field of study. 

“The sky is green,” he tells Laurel on their first date. 

“We were friends before we tried this dating thing,” Laurel reminds him breezily. “You told me you studied for that Algebra test in seventh grade when I knew you were playing basketball with Tommy the night before.” Her eyes shine despite her cool words. Just because she knows one thing, doesn’t mean she doesn’t wish for something else. 

For a long time, Oliver wishes that Laurel was the one. The soulmate he couldn’t lie to. 

But he lies to her anyway, in increasingly complex and hurtful ways. Later, on the island, he often wondered at just how fucked up he was for that—because he lied the most destructively to the one person on the planet he didn’t actually want to lie to. 

Maybe he hadn’t wanted it enough. 

“I’m an emotionally stable human being capable of functioning in meaningful social situations,” he deadpans to Sara. It’s their first night together, their bodies are still flush and sticky as they lay skin-to-skin. 

Her laugh is raspy, making her sound more mature than she really is. Her laugh is one of Oliver’s favorite things about her. 

“I would never sleep with my sister’s boyfriend,” she responds, voice wry, and that’s another one of Oliver’s favorite things about Sara Lance. She may be capable of lying to him, but she didn’t bullshit herself or others. 

And then there’s the island and Russia and everything in between. There’s a year where he returns as the lost golden son of Starling city, where he lies, lies, lies. 

(He thought it would protect him. Thought it would protect _them_. But Tommy’s dead anyway. Half of the city is dead anyway.)

Experts estimated that at least fifteen percent, perhaps even up to twenty-three percent, of the entire world’s population ever find their soulmate. It’s not rare, but it’s also not exactly common. Oliver is fine with this. He grew up in a family that lied to each other and lied to friends and peers and to the whole city. Lies are in his bones and in his skin, loaded in his mouth and easily triggered by his quick tongue. 

By comparison, the truth makes him feel awkward and exposed. 

At some point on the island, he stops thinking about soulmates all together. At first it was a daydream, something to get him _off_ the island, even if he couldn’t leave physically. And then so much happens, and he just wants to _survive_ , and it just seems like a silly thing to worry about. It’s the same when he gets back home. There’s the mission, a _reason_ for why he went through all that he did. He doesn’t go out as much, and he’s fundamentally broken at this point, but still he’s always loved fast and hard, needed companionship, sought a warm body to anchor him through the drift of night. He doesn’t make the connections he used to, like with Sara and Laurel, but Oliver is fine with this way of things. It’s safer this way. 

And then, one day, a young CSI with bottle-green eyes turns to him and asks, “I’m guessing you don’t know how hard it is to break someone’s neck?” 

Oliver opens his mouth to say, _“Hmm? No. No idea.”_ But instead he says, “Yes, I do.” 

And Oliver is a tradesman of careful, calculating phrasing. That had not been calculated, that had been compulsory. He knows, in that moment, that it isn’t absentmindedness that made him answer the way he did.

The younger man’s eyebrows raise, stunned. Felicity whips her head around, blonde hair flashing and drawing even more attention to the movement. 

“Really, _you?_ ” Dig deadpans, condescending, trying to play it off. 

“Yeah?" Lance, thank God it’s Lance, scoffs disbelievingly. “How’s that, Queen?” 

“TV,” Oliver answers cooly. “Thea’s got me catching up on the action movies I missed.” 

\- 

Barry wasn’t prone to lying before The Man in the Lightning. 

But then his mom is killed and his dad is taken away and Joe and the police and the psychiatrists all tell him that he is wrong, that he didn’t see anyone else that night, that he should _stop lying to himself and to the people who loved him_. Lies hurt ourselves and others, they tell him. But Barry learns that the truth hurts himself and others as well. And if the truth hurts as much as the lies, then where did that leave Barry? What was even the point, if it all hurt in the end? 

He didn’t start lying all of the time, and he never lied about what happened that night, even to appease someone else. But he learns that the truth is always complicated. He stops shouting out the truth, he omits things when he talks to Joe, he distracts people with rambling tangents and avoids situations where he is forced to choose between the truth and an outright lie. 

Truth is complicated. It hurts, and it is lonely. 

He tries his hardest to never lie to Iris. Because he _wants_ the brave girl with the kind laugh, the one who held him in the dark on That Night while he cried, he wants her to be his soulmate. 

But he does lie to her, without meaning to, early on. Just a few weeks After, when he’d tried to run away to Iron Heights to see Dad. Joe had found him, brought him back. Barry thinks that Joe had tried to control his temper, he really had, but Joe was scared and angry and told Barry that his behavior could hurt him, could hurt Iris one day, and that it was time for Barry to “face the truth.” 

Joe had yelled a lot. Barry, who had been a meek boy and who couldn’t remember ever being angry in his life, had screamed right back. He’d thrown and shattered a dinner plate and a glass. Kicked a chair so hard it broke his toe. He’d even thrown a picture frame at Joe’s head. 

The night ended with Barry wrapped tightly in Joe’s arms, the man crying softly into his hair as Barry had sobbed brokenly into his chest. And, later, when Barry was in bed and staring blankly up at the ceiling, Iris had snuck into his room. 

“Are you OK?” She’d asked. 

He wasn’t. He hated Joe at the same time he loved him. He was angry at his mom for dying. Angry that his dad left. Terrified of the Man in the Lightning, terrified he’d come back and take Iris or even Joe away. They were all he had left. He was too tired to pay attention in school but at night he couldn’t go to sleep. He felt like he was in a nightmare. Sometimes everything seemed too heavy to do anything, even breathe. 

He could’ve told her any of these things, but Barry had learned that the truth was complicated. 

And so he’d answered, “I’m fine.” 

He hadn’t even realized it had been a lie until two days later. At the time, it had felt good to cry a little about something else for a change. 

And then Oliver Queen asks him, “You’re working a similar case in Central City?” 

“No,” Barry responds. 

Diggle, Felicity, and Oliver all stop to look at him. Oliver’s lips thin, his face hardens. “Didn’t you tell Officer Lance that you were working a similar case in Central?” 

“I—” Barry tries again, but he _can’t stop_. “Yes.” 

_“Then which is it?”_

The truth is complicated.

Barry is completely helpless, his own mind and desires mere bystanders as he tells Oliver how he’d lied to Officer Lance, how he lied to his Captain, how he was seeking the truth of his mother’s murder. And then he runs before he can spill out anything else that’s better kept hidden. 

\- 

Oliver wakes to someone’s hands near his throat. He registers _enemy_ and reaches up, wraps his fingers around a long neck, but stops when he sees Barry’s face. 

“It’s you.” Just two words, so big a complicated. 

Barry’s eyes dart around and Oliver’s dazedly follow. Dig and Felicity have yet to notice that he’s awake. Strength failing, Oliver’s hand starts to slide weakly down Barry’s chest. But then the younger man catches it in his own, idly intertwines his fingers with Oliver’s. 

“Yes,” he breathes. 

Oliver licks his lips. “I don’t… know what to do with this.”

Barry breathes softly through his nose, an incredulous laugh. “I didn’t think that… I didn’t think that this would happen to me.” He looks at Oliver like he’s seeing him for the first time. Oliver hides a wince, something twisting despairingly inside him when he notices Barry’s glaze flicker over the thick, gnarled scars that ruin his chest and torso. “Are we sure?” 

“Most of the time I have no idea what I'm doing,” Oliver promptly confesses. 

“I have never been on time to anything in my life,” Barry whispers back. 

Oliver is tired, so tired, but he finds himself smiling a little. 

“What do you want, Oliver?” Barry asks, gripping his hand harder. “What do you want this to be?” 

His lips are dry and this throat aches, yet the words slide out, unbidden. “I want to be able to lie. Lying is… lying is my life now. Lies are all I am, all that’s left.” He takes a shaky breath, like he’s coming up for air. “I want you to be safe. And safe is far away from me. At the same time, I want you to keep holding my hand,” he confesses and makes a face as soon as the words escape him, ashamed. 

Barry’s expression is incredibly sad. A few tears fall down pale cheeks, and Oliver is startled to realize that they’re falling for his sake. 

“You couldn’t possibly want _this_.” Oliver means, _you couldn’t possibly want me, like this, just look at me, just look at what I made myself in to._ “What are you thinking?” 

“I’m thinking that the truth is complicated. That it hurts. And that it ends up being lonelier than a lie.” 

_This is what I wanted,_ Oliver has to remind himself amidst a wave of bitter disappointment. _This is the right thing to do._

And then a reckless grin breaks across Barry’s face. It is the single most attractive expression Oliver has ever seen in another person. “But I can’t help it, I’m just really curious. I keep thinking, ‘what if’, you know?” 

This morning, Oliver was sure that he was a being composed of scars and lies, of darkness and complex, inexplicable boundaries. So he surprises himself when he says, “What if we see each other again? Next week?” 

Oliver thinks he understands it now, that saying about lighting up a room with a smile. 

“Next week,” Barry promises. 

But then there's the lightning. And "next week" doesn't happen for a long, long time.

**end.**

**Author's Note:**

> Turns out I'm better at reading soulmate AUs than writing them. :'D :'D :'D 
> 
> It was fun to try, though! Day 3 down! 
> 
> Super rushed again. I apologize for any annoying errors!
> 
> Also: Title from "The Space Between" by Dave Matthews Band


End file.
